"Marxism is still regarded by purists as a form of scientific materialism, but it is not. The perception of history as an inevitable class struggle proceeding to the emergence of a lightly governed egalitarian society with production in control of the workers is supposed to be based on an understanding of the subterranean forces of pure economic process. In fact, it is equally based on an inaccurate interpretation of human nature. Marx, Engels, and all the disciples and deviationists after them, however sophisticated, have operated on a set of larger hidden premises about the deeper desires of human beings and the extent to which human behavior can be molded by social environments. These premises have never been tested. To the extent that they can be made explicit, they are inadequate or simply wrong. They have become the hidden wards of the historicist dogma they were supposed to generate. Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous, at least to their concept of progress. I hope that I have been able to show that this perception is profoundly wrong. At the same time, anxiety about the health of Marxism as a theory and a belief system is justified. Although Marxism was formulated as the enemy of ignorance and superstition, to the extent that it has become dogmatic it has faltered in that commitment and is now mortally threatened by the discoveries of human sociobiology."